Heidegger: Being and Time

The early existential analytic

A course on the thought of Martin Heidegger.

Course outline

1. The Question of Being — Heidegger reopens the oldest and most forgotten question — not what things are, but what it means that anything IS at all — and finds we must ask it through the one being who can: ourselves.
2. Being-in-the-World — We are not minds in boxes peering out at a world of objects. We are always already absorbed in a world of work — and Heidegger proves it with a hammer.
3. Das Man — The 'They' — Who are you, in your average day? Mostly not 'I' but 'one' — you do what one does, want what one wants. Heidegger names this anonymous master das Man, the 'they.'
4. Anxiety and Being-toward-Death — A dread that has no object, in which the world goes uncanny — and the one possibility that is unmistakably my own: my death. For Heidegger, facing it is not morbid but the door to a life that is mine.
5. Conscience, Authenticity, Resoluteness — A silent call — not morality, not guilt over deeds — summons you out of the 'they' to your own existence. To answer it is what Heidegger means by being authentic: not better behaviour, but owning the…
6. Care and Temporality — One name holds the whole analytic together — care — and beneath it lies the deepest claim of all: that the being of the human, and the meaning of Being itself, is to be sought in TIME.

Part of the Symposium course library.